Future of Sick Kids site
The Sick Kids site has now been sold to the Downing Group, one of whose businesses is student housing.
See their website.
Marchmont & Sciennes Community Council have a focus group concerning the Sick Kids site, and here are the notes from their final meeting. (Report dated 7/6/18)
We met with Fletcher Joseph Architects and Holder Planning this week where we received a preview of the proposals that will be submitted for planning permission in the next week or so. The critical changes to the design since we last saw it are:
- All public facing elevations of the new buildings will now be stone clad
- The lift tower at the back of the main hospital block will be removed
- The existing staircases on the sides of the wings of the hospital block and the corner infills will be refinished with metal rain screen cladding and full height glazing to differentiate them from that of the original hospital block
- The roof line of the student accommodation block no longer rises at its Northern end and has been remodelled with a more traditional pitched/hipped roof form.
- With the change of height, student accommodation has now been reduced to accommodate 323 students, roughly equally divided between single rooms and cluster flats for 5/6 students.
- The roof line of the affordable housing on Sylvan Place has been reduced by a further 1m. This has allowed them to be joined to the corner pavilion block better.
- The houses in Millerfield Place will be kept as single houses with the others split into garden flats and double upper units. There will be a total of 126 residential units of which 31 will be 1 and 2-bedroom affordable houses
- The building line in Sylvan place will be 2.5m back from the current boundary extending to 3.2 m in places, and they are proposing to widen the pavement along its length
- The basement carpark has been removed following advice received from the Council who considered “that the basement car park would detrimentally affect the setting of the listed building”. 16 car parking spaces are proposed in front of the hospital alongside a reduced public garden space
- The 125square metres at the corner of Sciennes Road / Sylvan Place is no longer designated for retail use and has been set aside as a community space. MSDT has been granted ‘first refusal’ of this area at zero land value (subject to agreement and demonstration of ongoing management arrangements etc)
Those of us at this presentation were surprised by the loss of the basement parking that was generally considered an innovative solution to the car parking issue for the site. As a result, we have organised to meet with the planners on Wednesday to discuss how their objection came about and to put forward our initial thinking on the plans as currently being prepared.
Please can you email me at pagsk2017@gmail.com with your immediate impression of these changes, which will help use to properly represent everyone in the community in how we respond to the changes proposed.
Douglas